In that press conference, Obama said,
“My preference—and I think the American people’s preference—would have been for
a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a thoughtful, fact-based debate
that would then lead us to a better place”.

The history of scrutiny into the NSA’s data
collection and spying makes a mockery of the President’s claims.Republicans in Congress egged President Bush
on when he engaged in national security overreach.During the first four years of Obama’s
presidency, as he expanded those programmes under the radar, both Democrats and
Republicans in Congress sat quietly, failing dismally in their oversight
responsibilities.Because for oversight
to work, it has to involve the conveyance of at least some information into the
public eye.Amy Davidson (see link
above) pointed out, for example, the absurdity of “oversight” which consists of
having “Senators constrained from talking about what they know”, how they know
what they know, and why what they know makes all the things that we don’t know
okay.

When some members of Congress—most
famously Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon—sought to delve a bit deeper into the festering
swamp of our national security apparatus, high-ranking officials within that
apparatus lied to them.Yes, lied,
carefully, calculatedly, and deliberately—rightly assuming that in the normal
course of events (i.e. without someone like Edward Snowden changing the course
of events) their subversion and treachery would not have been discovered.

How can the kind of oversight the
President has trumpeted—defended by some of the Senate’s most odious specimens
like Dianne Feinstein—work if a) most of the functionaries charged with
providing that oversight refuse to do their job; and b) officials within our
ever-more Orwellian and terroristic military-intelligence complex deliberately
obstruct the execution of those oversight functions?

The other problem with Obama’s assertion—that
he was just about to get around to sorting out all of the problems he and his
legal advisors deliberately built into the national security state—is that the
President has a track record.

At every turn, his administration has
worked to frustrate, obstruct, and attack whistleblowers.His administration has repeatedly seized the
opportunity—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya—to escalate wars
which function only to make the United States’ public less secure and protract
our involvement in conflicts which serve no imaginable purpose other than the
perpetuation of festering, debilitating, and incendiary conflict which enriches
and empowers profiteers and fundamentalists of all stripes.In the prosecution of those wars, he has
embraced terrorism, whether in the form of extrajudicial killings (most of us
call these ‘murders’), bombing campaigns, secret prisons (the most infamous
have closed, but others have gone mobile across South Asia and the Horn of
Africa), and arrests based not on the rule of law, but rather on the basis of the
kind of profiling enabled by the NSA’s data collection.

He has done his best to shield his
conduct of his war of terror from scrutiny.He eschewed public debate when it came to expanding the U.S. wars in
Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.And he had
the temerity to argue that Congress had no business in meddling with his war in
Libya because it wasn’t really a war.The
tortured chain of illogic that he constructed asserted that a war conducted
using drones—which is clearly how many wars will be conducted in the future—was
not really a war, because there were no U.S. “boots on the ground”.This troubled progressives, but they managed
to persuade themselves that Obama is a sober-minded, responsible individual who
would not abuse this aggrandisement of executive power, ignoring both the
mounting evidence of our President’s bloodthirsty irresponsibility and the
spectre of a George W Bush wielding such self-conferred impunity.

The centralisation of war making power,
its insulation from scrutiny, criticism, and debate, conspire to make Obama’s
terroristic wars highly personalised.In
other words—whether the kill lists (or ‘disposition matrices’ as the White
House calls them), the drone strikes, the spying, or the attacks on journalists
and whistleblowers—the wars that rage across a dozen fronts, conducted with
methods of shocking barbarism and brutality, really are Obama’s Wars in a way
that Iraq and Afghanistan never belonged fully to George W Bush.

Bush, after all, was joined by a coalition
of the unhinged in waging those wars.He
was backed by a cabal of neoconservative ideologues, a collection of Democratic
warmongers like Hillary Clinton, and virtually the entire Republican caucus in
Congress.Obama could undoubtedly find
such allies in Congress and in the right-wing commentariat if he chose.But the rationale, conduct, and deliberations
around his personalised style of terror have been so insulated and so
well-protected by a quasi-legal curtain that the worst charge we can throw at
those outside of his cabinet and inner administration circle is that of dereliction
of duty—a serious enough charge when the lives and liberties of people around
the globe are at stake.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.